Backing the Wrong Army

How many billions did we spend "defending" Western Europe for 45
years against the fearsome Red Army? How much do we spend to keep
NATO forces there, right now?
Modern field armies are only as strong as the industrial
economies that back them, of course. Yet it now appears the CIA
overestimated the Soviet Union's economic capabilities in the period
1960-1990 by a factor of 10. Is anyone starting to feel like the
victim of a fraud, yet?
When 1,500 Chechen freedom fighters attacked the large Russian
garrison in the captured Chechen capital of Grozny on Aug. 6 -- the
Russians have 30,000 troops stationed in the tiny breakaway Moslem
republic -- "The defeat (of the Red Army) at first seemed impossible
to comprehend," The New York Times reported Aug. 18. "But as
Alexander I. Lebed, the national security adviser now in charge of
the Russian war effort, pointed out at two news conferences this
week, the leaders of the Russian forces in Chechnya are corrupt, the
soldiers are poorly trained, rarely paid and badly equipped, and
consequently they have no will to win."
For weeks beforehand, reports Michael Specter of the Times,
rebels told the elderly residents of Grozny to stockpile food and
water in their cellars and wait for an attack on the 6th. The only
people caught by surprise were the lice-ridden Red Army recruits, who
had been busily selling their weapons to the rebels for enough money
to buy food.
The photos of the smoking Russian corpses in the streets, and the
dancing freedom fighters, were astonishing. Independence leader
Shamil Basayev got to the point in the final week of the
offensive -- Aug. 10-16 -- where he ordered his fighters to stop burning Russian
armored vehicles -- they found that if they just shot out the tires
the Russians would surrender, leaving a usable vehicle for the
Chechens.
As of Aug. 16, "the only Russian soldiers left in the center of
Grozny are corpses and prisoners," Mr. Specter reports. Three
thousand Russian soldiers were surrounded in their barracks by an
army of amateur teenagers, trapped with "almost no water, little
food, and no avenue of escape."
The fearsome Red Army.
Any freedom-loving American should be ringing the church bells to
celebrate this blow against tyranny. But the news has not been so
well received at Bill Clinton's White House.
Columnist Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun wrote on Aug. 8 that
once Boris Yeltsin's re-election was won, the Kremlin, which had
promised to make peace with the tiny Caucasian nation of 1.3 million,
"immediately resumed its savage war of extermination against the
Chechen people, in which, say Moscow sources, Russian forces have
killed 60,000. Yet Bill Clinton shamelessly compared the conflict to
America's own civil war, and rushed Yeltsin $10.2 billion in IMF
loans, half of which went to financing the Chechen war.
"This aid came on top of almost certain, secret assistance from
U.S. government in the assassination of the elected Chechen leader,
Dzhokar Dudayev. The KGB had tried many times to murder the
charismatic, elusive Dudayev. This column has been told that a U.S.
eavesdropping satellite, and radio-locating gear provided by
Washington, allowed a special KGB hit team to pinpoint Dudayev's
portable phone, then saturate the Chechen president's position with
rocket barrages.
As this supposedly fatal blow to the resistance was followed up
with a scorched earth resumption of saturation bombing, strafing and
artillery barrages, "The west sat back," columnist Margolis reports,
"impassively watching this crime unfold. No one wanted to rain on
tomorrow's (Aug. 9) inauguration ceremonies of President Yeltsin. ...
"It is sickening to watch Russia, a highly civilized, cultured
nation, and supposed democracy, act with Mongol ferocity in Chechnya.
It is infuriating to watch the U.S., Canada, and Europe
hypocritically close their eyes to -- and even abet -- this monstrous
crime. ...
"Who are we to fulminate against terrorism, when we, too, have
the blood of the Chechen people on our hands?" Mr. Margolis
concludes.
The next time Americans are tempted to wonder "What do these
crazy Islamic types have against the United States?" they might want
to remember the 60,000 people killed by the Russians in Chechnya in
the past several years -- 4.6 percent of the population, the
equivalent of 13.8 million Americans.
If nothing else, given the way Mr. Clinton's ATF blackshirts used
borrowed National Guard helicopters to fire down through the roof
with machine guns, murdering women and children at Waco,
freedom-loving Americans might want to make note of Mr. Margolis'
report that "Remarkably, Chechen independence fighters shot down
eight Russian helicopter gunships" in early August.
Maybe they'd show us how.

Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. The web site for the Suprynowicz column is at
http://www.nguworld.com/vindex/. The column is syndicated in the
United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box
4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.

Pallas, the new sci-fi adventure novel by L. Neil Smith is out in
paperback from Tor. Is there room for a socialist utopia on an
individualist asteroid?
Now available at good bookstores everywhere!

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Enterprise, Number 13, September 1, 1996.